Tidbits, Resources, and Discussion for ELI Faculty

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Make Quick, Free Videos

At New Horizons, I saw a demo of Animoto, a site that allows you to make free 30-second videos. (You can also buy an account, which allows you to make longer videos.) It's really neat--you just upload pictures (or use pictures they store on the site), select music (again, upload your own or use theirs), and then give it a name, and the site adds all the effects.

The ELI Student Services Staff just had a retreat a couple of weeks ago. Here's a video I made using Animoto and some of the pictures from the retreat.

Still haven't figured out how to add text on top of pictures--maybe one has to do that using photoshop or some other photoediting service before uploading the pictures. Anyway, it's fun to play with for personal use (the presenter showed a little video of him visiting his grandkids), or for teaching (I was thinking about making a little welcome video for the new ELI course I'm developing). You can see some cool things educators have done with the expanded version if you visit this part of the site (check out the "We the People" video or the case studies at the bottom. I think the "function notation" one is great).

Try it out and post your video links in the comments!

4 comments:

Cindy Miller said...

Here's three I made with my iPhone!
You'll see the stars!

This is dinner at New Horizons:
http://animoto.com/play/9uMllam0CQNd4YNKgBs05Q

This is our "Working Together" presentation:
http://animoto.com/play/2c2bRxdpyAYzxcyeel1afA

This is the van ride down and back!
http://animoto.com/play/Uf2aMSBC0lw1q58Qc0jaEg

I've also applied for the educational account, where you are not limited to 30 seconds, but 30 seconds of each of the above is probably just enough!

Jennifer Lerner said...

These are great, Cindy!

Let us know how it goes with the educational account.

Laura said...

are those REALLY 30 seconds? They don't seem quite that long. Can narration be added to these instead of music?

Jennifer Lerner said...

I agree--they seem to create shorter videos than what it actually says it will create. And for example, it says when you start that a 30-second video can take 12-15 pictures, but if you actually put that many in, it cuts off and doesn't include them all. I guess that as usual, freeware is not quite as good as what you get with a full account!

You can add your own audio track rather than using something from their site, so you could record your own audio narration and put that on; but, you would not control how the audio goes with the pictures, so if that mattered, then it wouldn't work. Don't know whether you can control that aspect in the full account.